I’ve just bought myself another domain name. I confess to being a bit of a domain-name hoard. I have loads of them. The one I’ve just bought is www.ckerr.net. (I haven’t made it clickable for reasons that will become apparent).

I bought it as a custom short domain for using on bit.ly. I was inspired by seeing that the short domain for The New York Times is “nyti.ms”, and that Tech Crunch uses “tcrn.ch”.

So, the links that I share from now on will be branded with “ckerr” rather than with “bit.ly”. My husband thinks it’s just vanity, which I suppose it is, but I like to think it’s also a bit of a shrewd branding exercise. After all, it reinforces my name when people see it and click on it.

I tried to buy something a bit closer to “Kerrmunications”. It would have been really nice – it was kerr.mu. But it was expensive and can’t be transferred to my current domain registrars. Also, I wasn’t sure about being able to use it legally as I had found conflicting advice about whether or not non-Mauritian companies can obtain Mauritian domain names.

So eventually I settled on ckerr.net. It was the shortest one I could register easily in the UK that was available.

The only drawback is that I can’t use the domain for anything else. To set it up for use with bit.ly, it has to “point” to bit.ly. If I upgraded my free account, I could get control of the domain back. But I really don’t think it’s worth the $995 a month!!

What do you think of custom domain names? And what would your ideal short domain for your business be?

PS – follow me on Twitter to see the custom domain in action!